“We made it a point to hire really smart, visionary
people and then let them do their work.
I wanted to delegate and let people be in charge of things. My
own decision-making process was to decide who got to decide. To
make decisions, you have to first outline the problem, and if you
hire really great people, they’re going to know more about the
problem they’re dealing with than you ever will.”–Scott
McNealy

I have interviewed Scott McNealy. Scott is a
Silicon Valley pioneer, most famous for co-founding Sun
Microsystems in 1982. We talked about Innovation, AI, Big Data,
Redis, Curriki and Wayin.

RVZ

Q1. You co-Founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and served as CEO and
Chairman of the Board for 22 years. What are the main lessons
learned in all these years?

While automatic filling of HTTP basic auth credentials works fine
on the Mac, I have had significant trouble getting it to work on
iOS devices. This is especially unfortunate, because while on the
road I sometimes need to have a look at monitoring systems that
have HTTP basic authentication enabled and that use long complex
passwords. Should be easy with iCloud keychain, right? Yeah...

Opening the respective site in iOS Safari pops up the basic auth
credentials dialog. It also shows the little key icon in the
keyboard toolbar which gives access to iCloud keychain entries.
However, while on the Mac the username and password fields are
correctly populated, on iOS you cannot even see the respective
entry.

Turns out, and I assume this is a bug in iOS Safari, the type of
keychain entries shown is limited to "Web form password". Safari
on the Mac stores the entry as "Internet Password" though, as can
be seen in the Keychain Access …

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can quick
start MySQL testing using Docker, specifically in a Mac
environment.

Like a lot of people, I’m hearing a lot about Docker and it’s got
me curious. The Docker ecosystem seems to be moving quickly,
however, and simple “getting started” or “how-to” type articles
that are easy to find for well-established technologies seem to
be out-of-date or non-existent for Docker. I’ve been playing with
Docker on Mac for a bit, but it is definitely a second-class
citizen in the Docker world. However, I saw Giuseppe’s blog on the new Docker beta for Mac
and decided to try it for myself. These steps work for the beta
version on a Mac (and probably Windows), but they should work
with …

Swift is now
opensource, and it’s interesting to see Craig
Federighi talk about it. This is Apple doing right,
considering FaceTime is long overdue to being an open standard. People
are nitpicking on Apple’s Open Source tagline, but really, this is akin to nitpicking on
Mark Zuckerberg donating 99% of his Facebook stock to his new
limited liability corporation charity (key: don’t look a gift
horse in the mouth).

Here’s your chance to get on stage with Woz! Sort
of. Apple co-founder and Silicon Valley icon and
philanthropist Steve Wozniak will participate in a moderated
Q&A on creativity and innovation April 14 during the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa
Clara, California.

Woz once said that he never intended to change the world. That
was the other Steve, Steve Jobs.

“I didn’t want to start this company,” Woz told the Seattle Times
of Apple’s beginnings in a 2006 interview. “My goal wasn’t to
make a ton of money. It was to build good computers. I only
started the company when I realized I could be an engineer
forever.”

What would you ask Woz if given the opportunity?

“Woz, what first sparked your interest in
engineering?”“Hey Woz, how did you come up with …

TechCrunch reported yesterday that Apple has
acquired FoundationDB. And while I didn’t see any mention if this
news on the FoundationDB website, they do have an announcement saying: “We have made the
decision to evolve our company mission and, as of today, we will
no longer offer downloads.”

This is an unfortunate development – I have been watching
FoundationDB technology for years and was always impressed in
terms of its performance and features. I was particularly
impressed by their demo at last year’s Percona Live MySQL and Expo. Using their Intel
NUC-based Cluster, I remember Ori Herrnstadt showing me how
FoundationDB handles single-node …

One thing that gets tedious in the IT community and Oracle
community is the penchant for Windows only solutions. While
Microsoft does an excellent job in certain domains, I remain a
loyal Apple customer. By the way, you can install Oracle Client software on Mac OS X and
run SQL Developer against any Oracle Database server. You can
even run MySQL Workbench and MySQL server natively on the Mac OS X
platform, which creates a robust development platform and
gives you more testing options with the MySQL monitor (the client
software).

Notwithstanding, some Windows users appear to malign Apple and
the Mac OS X on compatibility, but they don’t understand that
it’s a derivative of the Research Unix, through BSD (Berkeley
Software …

Like a lot of developers I started using a MacBook Pro around the
time of Tiger. I instantly loved it: simple, fast,
and virtually no system administration overhead. The genius of OS
X was that it never got in the way. You opened the box, pulled
out the machine, and got to work. It had a great user interface,
excellent development tools (Eclipse in my case) and the
command utilities like ssh, rsync, and bash worked seamlessly
with Linux systems.

Well, that was then and this is now. Starting with Lion I began
to spend an increasing amount of time fighting OS X instead of
getting work done. I'm now using Mavericks and have not seen much
improvement, in fact quite the contrary. Here are just a few of
the problems after the Lion to Mavericks upgrade:

About two weeks ago I noticed my iPhone 5 had a faint, but
ugly pink hue in the center of the screen. At first I suspected
some software issue, because it looked as if the hue was exactly
in the area an iOS7 table view uses for its cells to be displayed
(i. e. full screen, but with a few points of inset on the
left and right edges). Apparently someone must have left some
kind of view with a red-ish color behind the table view that was
now shining through, because of all the translucency effects iOS7
comes with.

Turns out though, that this was going on in all kinds of apps,
including Instapaper, Pocket, Chrome, Safari Calendar etc. All
those certainly would not put any views behind the actual
content. Getting more suspicious I showed the problem to several
colleagues who all did not see it at first, but once I had
pointed it out to them (most visible on a white background) none
of them could "unsee" it, …

Over on the codecentric blog I published an article about
localizing iOS and OS X applications called "Pseudolocalization for Cocoa Apps". It is
probably the first of a few, because it turned out rather long
already.

Content reproduced on this site is the property of the respective copyright holders.
It is not reviewed in advance by Oracle and does not necessarily represent the opinion
of Oracle or any other party.